Another day, another episode of TMNT. Pretty decent show yesterday. Nothing much to say to lead-in today.

Let’s watch a cartoon.

S.3, E.3: “Attack of the 50-Foot Irma”. Original Air Date: 10/23/1989

Plot:

It’s Irma’s birthday and the Turtles are hosting a party for her. They hit up April to discuss the menu, but she’s filming a story at the planetarium because a meteor crashed last night and the Professor wants to show it off on the news. As the interview with April begins, a gas is leaked into the room and knocks out everybody allowing Shredder to capture the meteorite while the cameras are still rolling.

Krang crystalizes the meteorite because whatever it’s made from has the power to enlarge things. They test it on Shredder and it works just as Krang designed, but it was only a dry-run. Now Krang wants to head to the surface to really get it going.

Shredder shows up on the surface with the enlarger ray, but when it comes up from underground, it just so happens to have April hanging off the top of it which causes interference so Krang can start the ray. When it’s finally in position, Krang misses Shredder with the shot, but catches Irma who was just walking out of the ice cream shop.

It doesn’t happen immediately, but eventually the effects of the enlarger ray kick in and Irma starts to grow like whoa. She ends up busting a huge hole in the wall at the studio and then starts terrorizing the city just because she’s a complete klutz.She’s 50′ tall and has completely forgotten how to act or walk around New York. Common sense, bro.

Krang sends Shredder back to the surface to find another piece of that meteorite so he can use his ray for the purpose he had in mind and, because Irma has people scared for their lives, it should be an easy get since all the attention is on Irma.

The Turtles go on the hunt for the other piece of the meteorite hoping that they can use it to reverse the effects on Irma, but Shredder shows up with Bebop and Rocksteady and we get a squash match with Shredder and his mutants getting in zero offense. Bad news, Irma wakes up from a nap and is hungry. She heads to the city to find food, but the military shows up to destroy the huge menace that is Irma. But before anything can happen, the Turtles mix the antidote in with a shit ton of ice cream and Irma swallows it and returns to her normal form.

Everybody rejoices by having Irma’s birthday party as scheduled complete with like 20 different pizzas that Michelangelo made that all look identical.

Final Thoughts:

Completely worthless episode. Same old shit. New weapon. Unintended effects. Reverse polarity of said weapon to restore order. Shredder gets away with almost zero fight. I dunno. I guess as a kid you didn’t mind this kind of stuff, but with watching some cartoons that came about later over the past few years, I’m really disappointed with how this one has gone since the strong beginning.

I guess this is just a product of the era, maybe. It didn’t matter what the show did as long as it sold a fuck ton of toys which it most certainly did. Even as someone who wasn’t the biggest TMNT fan back then, I still wanted the toys desperately. They were great.

So short review today, just because there really wasn’t a lot going on. Tomorrow we get back on the horse.